Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, a distributed printing system, and a method of controlling printing.
Description of the Related Art
Regarding print servers that handles print jobs collectively on the server in response to print requests from a plurality of client terminals, distributed printing systems deploying a plurality of print servers that perform print processing distributively on the server have been realized. In this kind of a distributed printing system, print processing load distribution is realized by dividing printers that handle printing among the print servers and managing them. By taking a configuration in which the servers are distributed, it is possible for a print server to handle a large number of print jobs, and furthermore, a configuration in which servers are redundant, wherein, in a case where an abnormality occurs in an operational state of a specific print server, it is possible for another print server to continue performance of the printing has been realized. For a processing distribution technique of a system for performing output of document data, or the like, through a plurality of processing apparatuses installed distributively in this way, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-260216, a technique has been proposed in which printer allocation to the print servers is managed, and an allocation of printer object (or a logical printer) to print servers is modified, for example, based on the operational state and the load conditions of the print servers and the printers. Note, a printer object (i.e. a logical printer) is a printer from the perspective of printer server software, and by providing a message including data, an instruction, or the like, to a designated printer object, printing is executed by the printer (or a virtual printer) corresponding to the printer object. A technique of generating this kind of logical printer by software, and performing printing through the logical printer is provided by, for example, a Windows (registered trademark) operating system, but this is not limited to Windows.
Also, normally, a printer object that corresponds to a printer driver is necessary in order to convert, prior to sending print data to the printer, the document data that is handled by the print servers into a printer language that the printer can interpret using the printer driver. It is common to generate printer objects beforehand for the print servers, and to print using those printer objects upon printing. However, as a technique for dynamically generating printer objects and performing printing has been proposed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2011-76226. Here, a method is proposed in which whenever printing is performed using a printer for which a printer driver is not installed, a printer object corresponding to a dedicated printer driver is automatically generated.
For distributed print servers to be capable of being easily scaled out, it is necessary to register printer objects for each printer driver corresponding to the printers beforehand to each of the plurality of print servers in order to convert print data into a printer language. However, whenever the number of servers is increased in such a case, it takes a large amount of work to register the printer objects to each print server. Also, registering the maximum number of necessary printer objects beforehand adds a large load to a spooler service because unnecessary resources are registered to the servers even in a case of printing in which conversion into a printer language based on the type of the print data is not necessary and the printer object is not used. Also, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2011-76226 is a technique for registering printer objects dynamically, but in this technique a printer object is registered dynamically within a single server, and realizing dynamic printer object registration in a distributed server configuration is difficult.
Also, the technique for distributing servers and modifying the allocation of printer objects dynamically recited in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-260216, the allocation of the printer that each server handles is determined, and it is difficult to easily modify the server configuration in order to scale out the servers in response to an increase in the amount of printing.